A pretty layer cake to make the best of the short-ish Meyer Lemon season. Layered with vegan meyer lemon curd, a creamy sage frosting, and made with spelt flour and unrefined sugars, it will please a crowd at your next Wintery gathering!

I'm back! After a bunch of busy weekends and recipe fails, I can finally bring you this beauty of a cake. It took some testing, because as I mentioned in this post, I'd really like to wander further into the world of less refined baking. So finding solutions to a few problems I had took time. Though I have learned a few valuable things.

I've learned that I am not a big fan of using vegan butter unless it's 100% necessary, like when I need it to create a flaky pie crust / some kind of pastry (coconut oil rarely gives me the flakiness I'm craving). Vegan butter just doesn't sit right with me the majority of the time. And in frosting, I've never really loved it as a substitute for cow's butter. Which is why I generally like to use a coconut cream frosting, or a chocolate ganache frosting made with coconut milk, or something along those lines.

I wanted to create a REAL frosting for this cake. A light and creamy dream of a thing that holds it's own at room temperature and doesn't leave me feeling weird after eating it. I also wanted something that didn't require 1000000 cups of icing sugar to become frosting. It's just not for me, if I'm being honest with myself.

So, my mind flickered to Amy Chaplin, author of the wonderful cookbook At Home In the Whole Food Kitchen. I've made a chocolate cake recipe of hers before that I was initially skeptical of, but that piqued my curiosity with it's unique use of agar in the frosting. The agar sets the frosting mix made of coconut milk, natural sweeteners and other flavourings, then you whiz it up in a food processor until it's suuuuuper smooth. It thickens in the fridge to become a perfectly creamy, light and not too sweet frosting that holds up perfectly at room temperature and sits sturdily in a layer cake. It's magic.

So I've adapted one of her agar-set frostings to use here, because my experiments with vegan butter frostings for this cake were leaving me unsatisfied and dejected. I'm so happy that Amy has brought this kind of frosting to the world, it's glorious. It can be a little frustrating to blend up at times, I had to use my food processor first and THEN my vitamix to get it perfectly smooth. But the result is worth it for sure. Do give it a try.